How does leadership change as the company scales?

Goro Kosaka / September, 2018

Description

Vufine was founded by Goro Kosaka in Silicon Valley in 2015. Goro is also President of Medicraft which is an agency that helps local and Japanese companies to launch their business in Silicon Valley and major clients include Rakuten, Optim, King Jim, KDDI R&D Labs.

Video Transcript:

How does leadership change as the company scales?

This is my second startup. The first one, I wasn’t the founder but a VP. It is always the team and people. As the company grow into different phases, you need different kind of people but at the same time you want to stay with all the friends that you’ve started a company with. At one point, you need to hire somebody professional to do what your friend has been doing.

The same thing applies to your own job you may be good at starting up, from 0 to 5 people. You always have to think that you may not be the right person to grow the company from 5 to 10 to 20 and then 50. But if you try to stick into the position maybe you’re limiting the growth of the company.

You have emotional attachment to your team and to the company so that’s the hard part and I think all the entrepreneurs and startups go through it. Some like Mark Zuckerberg he was doing great starting up the business and he is still doing great, but I think that’s very rare. Most of the people has a comfortable size of the company or the stage of the growth. Understand that and accept that you have to take somebody from outside to run, or move your original members to other positions so that you have better people working for that position.